Jagr fighting his years as Flyers play on

VOORHEES, N.J. — It wasn’t so much the makings of a playoff beard blooming from Jaromir Jagr’s face Monday as it was ... a prickly patchwork quilt?

New look, Jaromir?

“I only shaved the gray,” Jagr confessed, revealing a personal secret that only his stylist should know for sure. “That’s why it looks like this. … I don’t like the gray.”

Yes, it sucks to get old, even if the first sign of that is on your face instead of in your game.

Not so very long ago, Jagr was the boyish looking star with one of sports’ greatest, ebony-hued mullets. But Jaromir at 40 is a somewhat grizzled Flyers playoff face admirably adhering to the team’s superstitious “playoff beard” movement. It’s an old hockey tradition, of course, one that allegedly helps a team bond, even if the beards on some guys (Jake Voracek and Claude Giroux are two obvious local examples) look glued onto their chins and leave teammates in stitches.

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Jagr’s problem isn’t so much one of peach fuzz as senior stubble, however.

“I don’t want to dye it,” said Jagr, who apparently doesn’t know how to just wash that gray right out of his (facial) hair. Of course, if he looked hard enough, he’d see flecks of gray in some other locker room beards. But they are few and far between with this young club, one in which he otherwise seems to fit right in.

Jagr continues to be a steady and positive influence on Giroux as he develops into one of the league’s elite forwards. It’s why Giroux’s bosses are determined to re-sign Jagr in the offseason, even if that became a forgotten priority at some point.

During the regular season, Jagr produced like a top-shelf offensive weapon and was a leader in the locker room. But some beard pullers might mull over the toll a long season has taken on Jagr.

That’s something some management voices in Pittsburgh were wondering last summer after free-agent-to-be Jagr had played three previous years in Russia. When the Flyers seemed more willing to test his endurance level, Jagr signed here.

Now?

According to one league management source, Jagr was close to re-signing here late in the season, but those talks kind of got pushed aside in the push for the playoffs. Now, coming off a first-round victory against the Penguins in which he only scored one goal, but averaged one assist per game, Jagr has to avoid having the gray he shaved off his face show up in other ways.

He was not very good in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the New Jersey Devils. He was pointless and had only one shot on goal, but then he put in an impressive 16 1/2 minutes of ice time, too. It seemed to be a bit of a patchwork performance.

But maybe that’s because at 40 ... Jagr has had too much rest with six full days between series.

“You know, I didn’t feel very well,” Jagr said. “You don’t know how to practice. You win in six games, that’s going to be an advantage. But it’s not going to be an advantage in the first game back. It’s going to be an advantage, maybe, in Games 5, 6 or 7. That’s how you have to look at it, because you’re going to be rested more. They had two days, we had a week. Might hurt us first game ... might hurt us first two games. But it’s going to help us in Games 5, 6 or 7.

“When you don’t have jump, don’t have the legs, everything is kind of slower,” Jagr said. “You are late to rebounds. You don’t have very good chances to score goals. I can’t imagine what it would be if we won in four games. We wouldn’t have played for two weeks.”

A man can grow a beard in that time.

But Jagr’s many years in the game taught him patience. He knows his somewhat shabby performance in Game 1 does not necessarily translate to how he’ll be Tuesday night, when the one-up Flyers host the Devils in Game 2. He’s also patient with all the youthful snickers going around the locker room about the state of his semi-shaved face.

“They don’t know, they’re not 40 yet,” Jagr said with a look around. “When you’re 40 and you don’t want it to be gray, you have to shave it this way.”